Over at Bike Portland, Jonathan Maus advocates this morning for more funding to go toward Portland Bureau of Transportation patrols targeting motorists who fail to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks.

Among other things, he offers a rundown of city intersections where police have targeted motorists for violations, noting that officers have handed out 904 enforcement citations in five years.

“Just imagine how traffic behavior (and our entire street culture) might change if we had more funding and stronger tools to make enforcement actions like this a much more common occurrence,” Maus writes.

However, Maus doesn’t mention that transportation officials and police see apathetic and uneducated motorists as half of the problem.

The other half: Apathetic and uneducated walkers. (My guess is that the average pedestrian caught jaywalking is more the former than the latter.)

For instance, as Maus notes, the last 90-minute crosswalk mission of 2010 resulted in 27 citations issued to motorists, the highest number from any of the nine such enforcement actions last year. The two missions before that led to 5 citation and two citations.

Now, let’s look at the last time that Portland police conducted a 90-minute mission to crackdown on jaywalkers. It was in November along the Portland transit mall, a particularly dangerous area for pedestrians unwilling to cross at the corner or wait for a light.

Police gave out 23 warnings and 32 citations, primarily for entering traffic in the middle of the block and disobeying a traffic control device.